Do you recommend article marketing for SEO? vs Matt Cuts

Since I’ve been advising people to do article marketing for ages now, I think I should explain. Matt Cutts says you should NOT do article marketing. I say you should. The difference is due to a difference in definition and perspective.

What Matt Cutts warns against is writing for sites that will distribute your article all over the web. This will create duplicate content and help you get low quality backlinks to your sites and pages. I would never recommend this method and have never done this myself.

So we agree on that point.

Where we differ is in perspective; Matt Cutts is in charge of watching the quality of the search results on Google. He doesn’t want anything done that takes away from the ‘natural’ working of the web. However, what is natural?

I’m in the business of writing online and making a living that way. It’s my business to rank highly in Google by any ethical method that works.

I’m tempted to go all philosophical on you, but that is not what you read this blog for, so I’ll stop myself.

Instead here is why article marketing done right DOES work and how you should put it to good use:

Writing quality articles about your niche on various quality sites and interlinking themworks because Google is not about to stop counting ‘editorial’ links. You can get this out of the video too, if you listen carefully.

However, they are on the move to try and give social signals a higher priority. So you do also need to be on twitter and facebook. Though the Twitter-Google deal recently fell through, so unless Google+ really takes off, Google can’t really use many social signals at the moment. This is one reason though to check Google+ every once in a while to see if it’s taking off. I tried it for about a week and don’t think it will be very successful, but there is enough activity there to still have a chance.

Back to practical matters: what I do recommend is writing for various sites, interlinking your content and making sure you write on platforms with a high quality standard (like Wizzley). I also recommend starting and keeping up your own niche blogs if you have the money / technical skills to do so.

The thing to remember is:

Google cares about editorial links: in many niches your own links will help a LOT towards ranking because there just isn’t that much quality competition yet.

Google cares about editorial links: if you create quality content, you will get such links yourself.

Google cares about editorial links and to drown out article marketeers it will also look at how many domains you get links from. This is a reason to write on various sites and to own various sites.

People care about links too: link TO quality articles and sites and you’re more likely to GET links as well. Don’t be greedy about links.

Hat tip to squidu which I visited being frustrated over squidoo’s slow loading times this weekend.

Related

I watched the video and thought the title was misleading. I was thinking of article writing as what you and I do — original, high quality content published online. He is talking about something totally different. And of course, it’s not a good strategy.

It’s true that Cutts, working for Google, would tend to give self-serving advice (i.e. that which serves the interests of Google) but it’s also true that if he says Google frowns on a particular strategy, he’s probably right!